All posts tagged ‘earthquake’

This weekend the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) opened a new exhibit, Nature Unleashed. It’s all about natural disasters — what causes them, how we measure them and try to predict them, what sort of damage they can cause. For kids (and adults) who are interested in uncontrollable forces of nature, it’s a pretty cool exhibit about tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

YouTube user StoryMonoroch has posted a computer-generated video that displays seismic activity near Japan around March 3, 2011– the time-frame of the devastating earthquake and resulting tsunamis. The data rendering once again conveys the scale of this event, though this time from a geologic point of view.

The video starts slowly in order to give the viewer a sense of the background activity, and then at around 1:45, things change dramatically:

Obviously the video above does nothing to convey the resulting human devastation of the people of Japan. For a better sense of that, refer to the excellent before-and-after photo montage from ABC News, Australia.

I have now experienced two earthquakes in my life, the first on July 16, 2010, the same morning my son was born, and again yesterday, August 23, 2011. I never thought that living on the East Coast that I’d ever rock the way that I did today. My two-year-old thought that he was on a roller coaster, and loved it. On the other hand, my heart was pounding for hours after the quake.

I know that I always love looking at the scientific data after an earthquake, especially looking at seismograph strips where you can see where the earth moved and each subsequent aftershock. A seismograph is an instrument used by seismologists (earthquake scientists) to record the strength or intensity of earthquakes. Seismologists use a seismograph recorded strip to determine the intensity of the initial quake (5.8 on the Richter scale) and its subsequent aftershocks. Seismologists can also gather more information from a seismograph than just intensity; they are trained to analyze all of the bumps and movements to determine what kind of tectonic movement caused the quake, whether it is a dip slip fault or a strike slip fault.

Building a home seismograph is pretty easy. (Not to mention it will give your kids something to do if school has been cancelled because of East Coast Quake 2011.)

[See all the directions for making Helene McLaughlin’s home seismograph at GeekMom!]